Turning to FIG. 1 of the drawings, a conventional interconnect system 100 can be seen. In this system 100, integrated circuits (ICs) 102 and 104 communicate with one another over a communication channel 106. Typically, this communication channel 106 is part of a backplane and is generally a trace (or several metal traces). A problem with this arrangement is that the physical limit for data rates or data transmission is being reached. As a result, several different types of communications links have been or are being developed: optical and wireless links. Each of these developing technologies employs the use of a transmission medium, namely an optical fiber for optical links and a metal waveguide for wireless links. Each of these two technologies, however, have issues related to misalignment.
In FIG. 2, an example of an interface between an IC 202 and optical fiber 204 can be seen. In order to provide a communication link, the IC 202 generally includes an on-die light emitting diode (LED) or photodiode 210, which has an optical axis 206. Usually, the LED 210 (on the transmitter side) is a laser diode, which has a particular wavelength or frequency, and the optical fiber 204 is dimensioned to accommodate the wavelength of the light emitted from LED 210. Typically, the optical fiber 204 is a monomode fiber to improve bandwidth, which has a diameter that is related to the wavelength of the light emitted from LED 210. For example, for near infrared (i.e., wavelength between about 0.7 μm and about 3 μm), a monomode optical fiber will generally have a diameter between about 8 μm and about 10 μm. Thus, a misalignment (of even a few microns) between the optical axis 208 of the optical fiber 204 and the optical axis 206 of the LED (or photodiode) 210 may result is a poor interconnect or no interconnect. Therefore, precision machining or other more exotic micro-optical structures would generally be necessary. The same would also be true for metal waveguides; namely, precision machining would generally be necessary for proper alignment. Metallic waveguides for sub-millimeter waves are also quite lossy substantially limiting the distance over which the waveguides would work.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved interconnect system.
Some other examples of conventional systems are: U.S. Pat. No. 5,754,948; U.S. Pat. No. 7,768,457; U.S. Pat. No. 7,379,713; U.S. Pat. No. 7,330,702; U.S. Pat. No. 6,967,347; and U.S. Patent Pre-Grant Publ. No. 2009/0009408.